“Where else would she have been?”
“That’s what we need to find out,” the stick figure answers unhelpfully.
The blackness is beginning to make Mackenzie’s head ache, and she rubs her eyes.
“Do we really have to do this here?” she asks the stick figure. “Isn’t there somewhere else? I think this place is beginning to make me ill.”
“It will be over soon,” the stick figure assures her, “if you’ll only answer our questions. Even if you do not, it will be over soon, because we have so very little time.”
I can see black light, and Any customer can have a car painted any color he wants so long as it is black, and All the pictures had all been washed in black, and–
“You need now to focus, please, Agent Regan. Your mind is straying.”
No, my mind is smothering.
“Where was the water coming from?” the stick figure wants to know.
“From everywhere,” Mackenzie tells it. “It was coming from everywhere all at once. I don’t know. It was like the air started bleeding water.” She stops rubbing her eyes and goes back to looking at her hands, pale as chalk or mascarpone, the veins like a roadmap traced in blue and violet ink. They look like a dead woman’s hands. Or like the hands of a woman deep in a coma, kept alive by machines and the men who keep the machines alive. Either way, the hands of a broken woman.
“Are you saying that it was raining inside the airplane?” the stick figure asks.
“No, it wasn’t like rain. It wasn’t at all like rain.”
“How was it not?” asks the stick figure, and it leans back in its black seat, intently watching without eyes. “How was it not like rain?”
“It wasn’t falling,” Mackenzie replies. “And it was saltwater. We were going over the report on the Gove situation again, and—”
“And, at this point, where was Agent Nicodemo?”
“In her seat,” says Mackenzie.
“She wasn’t included in the discussion? Why is that?”
For a moment, Mackenzie silently stares back at the stick figure and at all the blackness behind and around and above it, all that seething, light-devouring void, and she wonders, briefly, what would happen if she at least tried not to answer any more of its questions. Ellison Nicodemo might not be the very last thing she wants to talk about, but she isn’t far from it. And for the first time it occurs to Mackenzie Regan that it might not be Albany conducting this debriefing. For all she has any way of knowing, it might be someone from Barbican or, much worse yet, the Julia Set crowd.
“Time is a factor,” the stick figure reminds her, crossing its arms again.
“No,” says Mackenzie. “She wasn’t included in the discussion. She was so high I doubt she could have made it to the toilet on her own. That woman shouldn’t even have been on the plane,” she says. “I told him that, before we picked her up, that the three of us returning on the same flight was an unnecessary risk, but he wouldn’t hear it.”
“So when the plane began to flood, she was still in her seat?”
“Isn’t that what I just told you? Aren’t we in a hurry?”
The stick figure sits up straight once more, and with a stick-figure arm it makes a motion like someone smoothing back their hair. It nods its featureless, round head. “Returning, then, to the water, please describe now, as briefly as possible, and without omitting any salient details, how events unfolded on the aircraft after it began to flood.”
Mackenzie Regan glances up at the ugly gyre where the ceiling should be.
“There were fish in the water,” she says. “Little silver fish, like minnows. I held one in my hand. There were lots of them. Hundreds, maybe.”
When she looks back at the stick figure, there’s that heat shimmer again.
All I want is blackness. Blackness and silence.
Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side, which he never shows anybody.
Darkness is your candle.
Mackenzie shuts her eyes. Or she only imagines that she does, just as it may only be an illusion that she’s sitting at a black table in a black room, being interrogated by a black stick figure. She shuts her eyes and she tells a story about an airplane filling up with seawater high above the Utah desert. She keeps her eyes closed tight, and she remembers the tale aloud, because maybe when she’s done they’ll let her wake up or let her finish with dying; either way, surely she’ll be free of the terrible black place.
She talks, and it all comes back in fits and starts, like stuttering frames of an impossibly absurd film she saw a long, long time ago.
The cold water and the little silver fish.
Smoke and sparks and screaming alarms.
And the moment when Ellison Nicodemo disappeared. There one second, gone the next, like a cheap parlor trick.
“You actually saw when she vanished?” asks the stick figure.
“Yeah. I was looking right at her. The water was already knee deep and the plane was pitching forward. We were already losing altitude. She was trying to get her seatbelt fastened. That ought to be funny, don’t you think? It isn’t, but it ought to be.”
The smell of ozone and electrical fires. The poisonous stink of jet fuel.
“Seawater freezes at about twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit,” she says, because maybe the stick figure doesn’t know these things. Because maybe no one ever bothered to tell it. “At that height, the air outside the plane was, what, fifty below? When the emergency door opened, all that water pouring out into the sky and taking us along, it was like . . . did you see that video online of someone tossing a bowl of hot water into the air, the way it instantly crystallized and fell as snow?
